"I should get a job, I suppose." He gazed down at the five dead Blank People again. "But doing what? Being what? I can't work in some office. And labor work. ha. Most of the factories in this city are boarded up, and the jobs they do have are filled with robots and clones. Even these fucks here had a job."
Mira had no answers for him. Being a mutant in one of the most impoverished slums in Punktown, her own dreams had always been so limited that she had no imagination for them.
He looked up at her suddenly. "So, you have this gift. You heard Brat die; you saw it in your mind. Can you control it?"
"A little, but mostly it's random. I catch bits of other people's thoughts. They sort of come through the static, if you know what I mean. And sometimes people even hear my thoughts, so I guess I must be transmitting and not just receiving."
"Can you read my mind right now?"
She grinned shyly. "No."
He smiled back. "Good," he said, with teasing ambiguity. In fact, even he didn't know what he meant by it. Was he flirting with her? A dwarf from Tin Town? He knew some men sought out the city's mutant brothels for the express purpose of experiencing things like that. Maybe small people appealed to their inner pedophile. Personally, Javier had never been into mutants, amputees, and the like. He had slept with women who'd undergone some wild body modification, however, and he also found some of the alien races attractive: he'd dated a Choom, and he'd once had a crush on an exotic Kalian girl, though with her strict culture she hadn't given him the time of day.
Looking shyer than ever, and maybe even a bit wary that he might be mocking her, Mira stumbled back to their earlier subject. "You know how I was saying the Blank People are all linked into one server, most likely? I think I've even picked up on the computer's thoughts a little. Kind of like a gibberish that I can't even put into words. More like listening to bugs making sounds."
"Hold on. You can read machines' minds, too?"
"Well, if that's what I'm hearing, it must be an encephalon mainframe. You know-a computer made out of bio-engineered human brain tissue. So it would be partly organic."
"Ahh. Yeah. Too bad your power isn't stronger, so you could order that thing to shut these Blank People down."
"I wish I was that powerful."
Lost in thought for a moment, Javier placed his foot against one of the Blank People's heads and turned it on its rubbery neck so that he could better make out the number recessed into its forehead. 9-A. He then observed, "I wonder if these things were more than just guards. Maybe they were meant to be servants, too."
"I've thought of that. Especially given the name Steward Gardens."
"Why, what does 'steward' mean?"
"Well, a steward is sort of like a servant. Or a waiter, or a guy on a ship who might take care of the passengers. You know?"
"Nice. Everyone with their own slave slash bodyguard. But the apartments themselves are all pretty small. One bedroom each. Not a good place to raise a family."
"More likely it was geared toward unmarried young professionals. Office drones in cubicles, who wouldn't mind cubicle apartments. But they'd pay big money for them because it's right in the heart of one of the city's best sectors."
"Six apartments to the front of both wings, and six on the sides. What's at the back of the building?"
"Maintenance offices, and the elevators and stairs to the upper floors."
"Ah. But what about the middle in both wings? The apartments line the outer walls, so what's behind the opposite side of the hallways?"
"Come on, I'll show you."
They left 6-B, closed its door behind them, and found themselves in a murky carpeted hallway. Javier followed the miniature woman further down the passage until they came to one of the far-spaced doors on the opposite wall from that in which the apartment doors were set. She opened this, and they stepped into a single large chamber.
Mira's voice echoed somewhat as she explained, "On the ground floor of B-Wing, we have this big empty room that I figure must have been a function hall the occupants could have used for parties, business meetings, whatever. On the floor above us is a tennis court. And on the third floor, a swimming pool, but it's empty."
"Now I can really see why they'd pay big munits to live here. What about A-Wing?"
"On the ground floor, a little cafe, mostly vending machines and a few tables." She saw Javier's mouth open but cut him off. "The vending machines were never stocked. On the second floor is a gym. On the third floor is a little movie theater."
"Nice place. And I can't wait to get the hell out of it." Javier looked about the dark, cavernous function room. "How about the roof? There must be a heliport up there. Have you gone up?"
"Yes. But the Blank People came out of their nooks and started climbing right up the walls. Like I said, they've been killing all the pig-hens they find up there."
"So they stay in their nooks when they're not directly attacking, huh?"
"Yeah. I don't know if they sleep, exactly."
They left the function room and shut its door. Together, they started back toward their camp in 1-B. Walking slowly out of deference to Mira, Javier asked, "You got a gun?"
"No."
"Take this one. I got one of my own." He handed her a pistol, explained, "That was my friend Brat's. I gave it to him for his birthday one time."
Mira examined the mean little pistol as they walked, and smiled as if he had given her a flower plucked from a field they wandered through. "Thanks." She tucked it in the waistband of her white shorts.
With her hands free again, she reached up to rub her temples in circles with her fingertips. Seeing this, Javier frowned. "What? Headache?"
"Yeah. I get bad ones a lot."
"Related to your gift?"
"I guess so."
"My mom used to get bad headaches, so she had me rub her feet." "Her feet?"
"I guess she thought it was like acupuncture, where one part of your body is connected to another."
"I think that's just a story you tell girls so they'll let you rub their feet. It's so innocent. 'I did this for my mom, baby, really.'"
He chuckled. "Yeah, maybe you got me on that."
Mira glanced up at him, embarrassed. "I mean, not to say that anyone would want to rub my feet."
"What? Why wouldn't they?"
"Well, they're so small."
"Come on. So who likes girls with big feet?"
By now they had returned to 1-B-and in the middle of a heated argument. At first Javier expected it to be between the Snarlers and the Terata, until he saw the fury twisting the faces of Nhu and Mott. Nhu was holding her forearm as if she'd been injured. The Choom whirled toward his leader and said, "She was trying to use her wrist comp to call the forcers down here, man!"
Javier glared at the Vietnamese girl. "I thought I told you-"
"How long should we stay in here, Javier? The muties have been here eleven days! Maybe they got no place better to go, but I have a family waiting for me! This is crazy-all we have to do is make a call! We're right in the middle of Beaumonde, here! Cars are driving right past us! We aren't stuck on some other planet."
"We can't get the forcers involved in this. We'll be thrown in prison."
"I'd rather be there than here."
"Oh, really? I don't think so. We can get out of here, and we will. Where's your comp?"
Mott held it up. "I got it."
"You almost broke my arm, you dung-dong!" Nhu screeched at him.
"Blast you."
"All right, everyone give Patryk your hand phones, comps, whatever."
"Why Patryk again?" Nhu sulked.
"Because he's one of the only people I can trust anymore, looks like. Besides, he's got a backpack."
"Nobody better steal that boy's backpack," the mutant named Satin quipped. "They'll have all the food and all the phones."
"Nobody should be panicking," Javier snarled at Nhu, but then he ran his hot eyes over all the other faces, whole and mutated, as well. Barbie w
ith her five. "We lose our nerve, and our cooperation, and we die. You wankers think I've lived to be twenty-five by acting all panicky every time I was in danger?"
"Yeah," Tiny Meat told Nhu. "You get out of Folger Street and suddenly you forget what you are?"
"Shut it, scrotum-face."
"Bitch."
"All of you!" Javier roared. Silence prevailed at last.
Tall, quiet Patryk collected a few devices and stowed them in his backpack. Nhu had begun to sob. She backed into one wall, slid down to its bottom, and wrapped her arms around her legs. "I'm sorry, okay?" she whimpered. "I'm sorry."
Near her, the spidery Choom mutant named Haanz cooed, "You'll be all right. It will all be okay." He started to reach out with his extra-long fingers to stroke the silky black hair that hung down to obscure her face, now that she had freed it of her lime-green swimming cap, but Nhu lifted her head abruptly.
"Don't touch me!"
The mutant withdrew his hand and averted his eyes shamefully.
"Patryk," Javier said, taking him aside, "get on Nhu's comp and look up Steward Gardens on the net. Maybe you can find us something useful, blueprints or whatever. Maybe something we can use to fight or shut down those zombies out there."
Patryk nodded, and moved into the next room.
Javier sighed, then lifted one arm and sniffed at himself. "So the showers work?" he asked Mira.
"Yeah. Come on, I'll show you how to use them." She preceded the leader of the Snarlers to the bathroom.
"I'm sure he isn't quite that dumb that he can't figure out how to use a shower," grumbled Satin, strapped in his cybernetic pony.
Flattened-faced Nick gave a snort of amusement. "Jealous, man?"
Satin turned his bald head and gave his friend a withering look.
In the bathroom, Javier watched Mira lean into the shower stall to point out the various controls to him. When she was done explaining, she turned around to see that he already had his shirt off. She seemed stunned by the bared sight of his lean upper body, with its scattered scars and tattoos. The stylized dog head baring its fangs, the insignia of the Folger Street Snarlers, adorning his left pectoral.
When he saw her embarrassment, or whatever else was there on her face, Javier smiled and said, "Sorry."
Her eyes moved to a long raised scar above his collarbone. She reached up to touch it lightly with one finger. "What was this?"
"We got into it last year with a Tikkihotto gang. They had those axes of theirs-what do you call 'em-e-ikkos. This kid whacked me with his e-ikko.
I could've had this smoothed away, but that's money, and…" He shrugged. Obviously he was fond of his battle scars.
She still rubbed the scar with her finger, her face as absorbed as a doctor's. When she finally started to lower her hand, Javier closed his own over it. He guided it down his chest, her finger like a pencil. Tracing across his nipple, lingeringly. Down the steps of his ribs. Into the hair of his belly.
His eyes held hers. Neither of them smiled now. It would be too vulnerable, just then, to do so. Or it might make things seem joking. This was not a time for joking. Their situation was very serious, here: in matters of war, and in matters of attraction.
CHAPTER NINE
bed cames
Stake despised the situation comedy called Buddy Balloon, starring a mutant discovered by the producers in Tin Town, by the name of Buddy Vrolik. Buddy was a 150-pound sphere, without limbs, without facial features, without anything but artificial ports into which nutrients were fed and from which wastes were pumped, these substances contained in tanks stored under the motorized cart he rested in. He could move this cart about via a chip implanted in his brain, which resided inside that globe like a yolk in an egg. Similarly, he could have his thoughts expressed through a speaker in his cart, in the form of a synthetic voice.
In Tin Town, prior to his discovery, his sister had let Buddy sit all day in a child's plastic swimming pool in her living room, soaking up a nutrient solution usually fed to malnourished infants from a baby bottle.
In the comedy, Buddy-whose mutation, Stake had read, was called Acardia amorphus-was the centerpiece of a lovable if trouble-prone family, berating them or giving them smart-alecky wisecracks in a city tough accent. He was famous for his lewd comments and double entendres, when female friends visited the apartment.
Stake couldn't fault Vrolik for humiliating himself this way. It was a better life than he'd ever known. He'd been able to move his family out of Tin Town. But Stake knew that Vrolik's benefactors had not been motivated by concern for his welfare. And if other mutants, each more grotesque than the last, became the subjects of their own sitcoms produced by rival networks, then it would not set into motion a wave of public concern for the horrendous living conditions of Tin Town, the epidemic lack of health care for the poor, the toxins in the air. It would set into motion a wave of laughter, from viewers smugly relieved that they had two arms, two legs, two eyes.
Janice Poole returned to the bedroom, wrapped in a purple silk robe and toweling her gray-threaded dark hair. She saw what he was watching as he still lay nude on her bed, but with the skin sheet pulled up to his chest. "Oh, this guy is so funny," she said, sitting down on the edge of the mattress. "I saw him interviewed on VT a few weeks ago and he really is funny in real life, too."
"The indomitable human spirit," Stake said drily.
Janice looked around at him. "I missed you in the shower, lazybones. We could have had fun in there." She leaned down over him and pressed the side of her face to his crotch, the living flesh of her bed sheet forming a thin barrier between his flesh and hers. She pretended to be listening to a baby inside the womb of its mother. "I hear something kicking in there."
Stake ruffled a hand through her hair in a gesture more obligatory than affectionate. He had not been too lazy to shower with her. He had needed the few minutes alone, after the hours they had spent in bed together tonight. They had been watching movies on the entertainment system opposite the foot of her bed. Some of her favorite movies, starring some of her favorite actors.
She had instructed Stake to keep his eyes on the screen. Occasionally she had even touched her remote in order to freeze a huge close-up, so that he could focus on his subject all the better. Like a sniper, keeping her target in her sights. In this way, Janice Poole had at first made love to the hot new actor, Crow Tidwell. And after she had had her fill of Crow, she had exchanged him for the leading man Harris Docker, but in a movie a few decades old, from when he'd first become popular. Stake had not objected. He had complied, passive beneath her, or even behind her. Once in a while stealing a look at her skin, instead, to keep himself aroused.
She raised her head to smile up at his face. "My toy," she said. She was so honest about it; how could he hate her for it? "Back to your 'default' mode, I see."
"Sorry."
She narrowed her eyes perceptively, but didn't say anything. She followed his gaze back to the screen, watched Buddy Vrolik for a few moments. In a slapstick scene, his rascally sitcom nephews were trying to roll him down a bowling lane in the hopes of winning a competition. It was VT; of course they'd get the trophy. Janice said, "How come your face isn't turning all blank right now? What keeps it from trying to copy him?"
"My subconscious seems to know when it's something beyond my reach. I don't try to turn into a Bedbug," he said, referring to the bipedal insectoid race, from an alternate dimension like the Ha Jiin. "I won't even try to mimic a Tikkihotto." This of course was one of the handful of alien races that were truly humanoid, but whose "eyes" were squirming nests of clear ocular filaments. "I could reproduce their faces in general, but because their eyes are so different my gift shuts down and refuses to try."
"Okay, so if your gift is controlled by your subconscious, can't your subconscious be controlled by drugs? Or a chip? Or even therapy?"
Stake met her eyes. "Why? Are you anxious to lose your toy?"
She arched a brow at him. "I'm only saying, why di
dn't you ever do that?"
"I guess I feel this is who I am, now. It came in handy during the war. Comes in handy in my job. And, I suppose it makes me feel a bond with my mother. She was a mutant, too."
"You don't think there's something masochistic about not dealing with it?"
"What do you mean?"
She held up her hands to ward off potential anger. "Never mind. I'm being too personal, maybe. Things always deteriorate when men and women stop fucking and start talking instead." She sighed. "I'm not good with long-term relationships."
"Me neither," he muttered. Though he resented the way she had used him tonight, at least she had wanted him in some way. He had found it difficult to meet a woman who wanted anything from him at all. If she wanted his money, that made it easy enough, in a brief and barely satisfying way.
"Has anyone ever played these games with you before?"
"Well, I once had a woman hire me to find her missing husband. It turned out he'd been murdered by a business associate. She was devastated; especially because she'd doubted him by thinking he'd run off with another woman. A few months after I found him, she contacted me again. She, ah, paid me to take on her husband's appearance. We met a few times for sex." He shrugged. "Then, about a month after we stopped that, I heard she committed suicide."
"Wow."
"I wondered, for a while, if I made her problem even worse, by doing what I did."
"Oh no, don't say that. She was badly messed up already. You take on people's faces, Jeremy, but I think you take on their pain a lot, too."
Again, he met her eyes. It was a more insightful and sensitive observation than he would have expected from her.
In a moment, however, she was back to being the playful Janice, smirking and asking, "Did a man ever pay you to impersonate a lost female lover?"
Stake confessed, "I guess the last time I met with John Fukuda, when I was leaving him, I was kind of afraid of that. Afraid he might ask me to take on his dead wife's form. He'd been looking at me very strangely through lunch. Especially after he'd had a few drinks. I thought I saw tears in his eyes. Then again, he'd talked a little about his twin brother, earlier."
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